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Monday, April 24, 2017

These Final 100 Days

On October 22nd, before the Comey letter cut off his opponent at the knees, Trump threw a Hail Mary by giving a rally at Gettysburg in which he trumpeted all of the things he'd accomplish in his first 100 days:

On April 29th, Donald Trump will have occupied the Oval Office for a hundred days. For most people, the luxury of living in a relatively stable democracy is the luxury of not following politics with a nerve-racked constancy. Trump does not afford this. His Presidency has become the demoralizing daily obsession of anyone concerned with global security, the vitality of the natural world, the national health, constitutionalism, civil rights, criminal justice, a free press, science, public education, and the distinction between fact and its opposite. The hundred-day marker is never an entirely reliable indicator of a four-year term, but it’s worth remembering that Franklin Roosevelt and Barack Obama were among those who came to office at a moment of national crisis and had the discipline, the preparation, and the rigor to set an entirely new course. Impulsive, egocentric, and mendacious, Trump has, in the same span, set fire to the integrity of his office.

What all of this amounts to is that this is a fight Republicans and the Trump White House will have a very, very hard time winning. But I don’t think President Trump knows that.

Now, the logical question is “Josh, why do you assume they don’t understand what you find so obvious? Are you sure they don’t know something you don’t? Or maybe they know more than you realize?”

Really? C’mon. Can the Trump White House be this legislatively inept? This self-deluding? Of course, they can. It’s an empirical reality we see everyday. It’s how we got to three months into the administration with no major legislation at all getting passed. With any other White House we’d need to posit some grounded strategy. Here positing that goes against really all evidence.

Sean Spicer just immolated himself trying to spin away the poor record, saying "Now, as we sprint towards these final 100 days...."

I don't think Trump is going anywhere (I'd love to be wrong), but I'll make a prediction here and say that Spicer doesn't last the next 100 days in the White House.